I’m feeling moved to write and share from the heart. Sometimes the mind and ego get in the way, but I’ve been listening to more of the Shades of Awakening interviews and am feeling totally inspired! Women like Kimberley Jones and Katie Mottram are such wonderful examples of host Dabney Alix’s phrase ‘claim and integrate the gifts from spiritual emergency’. I’m also feeling blown away by the synchronicity!

Katie ended her fantastic interview by sharing that in the midst of her turmoil someone had given her a stone. Written on it was the word ‘BELIEVE’. She’s learnt to believe in herself, in her experience and is now encouraging others to do the same. Here’s the synchronicity, here’s what came through to me when I was writing the dedication for my new book:

For You

I’ve written this book because I believe in you. I believe in your ability to heal and grow. I believe in your ability to wake up, to become self-aware, to move towards love and away from fear. I believe in your ability to take ownership of your journey towards wholeness. I believe in your courage, determination and perseverance, all of which you will need to succeed on this journey. Above all, I believe you. I believe your experience. I believe it has a deeper meaning, a soulful meaning. I honour that and I honour you.

So, Katie, I honour your experience. I honour you and ALL that you are bringing to help raise awareness and understanding of the spiritual perspective on mental health. Here’s to Synchronicity Worldwide!

In Kimberley’s interview, I really appreciated how she shared living totally from the heart, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, following her intuition and joy. I’m still learning how to do that more consistently and felt really validated in all my trials and errors by what she shared.

Kimberley ended her interview by telling us about her free gift, her Soul Whispers e-book, which covers 11 ways in which your soul can be calling you to wake up; 11 signs that your soul is whispering to you to give yourself permission to live the life you want to live.

And here’s the synchronicity: when I was working on my new book (sorry, I’m not trying to plug it, really!) I didn’t want to call the first section an Introduction. I know a lot of people skip ‘introductions’ and there was some important information that I didn’t want readers to miss. So I asked myself ‘what is this section really about? If I’m introducing the book as a whole, what sums up its message in a nutshell?’ The title I came up with is ‘The Life You Want to Live’, the very phrase Kimberley ended her interview with. And that is the message of the book, that a mental health crisis is an opportunity for the kind of healing and growth that will lead you to the life you want to live.

So Katie and Kimberley, once again it feels as if this whole journey is being orchestrated from above. We really are all singing from the same song sheet now. You both and Dabney are such an inspiration to me. Thank you, Katie! Thank you, Kimberley! Thank you, Dabney!

A few thoughts after my wonderful conversation with Dabney Alix of Shades of Awakening! Dabney asked me ‘can having a mindfulness practice help prevent someone going into crisis?’ Great question! What I didn’t say is that these crises, when properly understood, validated and supported are such an opportunity for deep healing and growth, that we wouldn’t necessarily want to prevent them – as strange as that might sound!

We would certainly want to make them more manageable and less intense and that is where mindfulness can really help us, which is the point I made with Dabney. If we could do all the healing work and releasing of old trauma and wounds without crisis that would be wonderful, but often we don’t even realise we need that level of healing. Or we’ve gotten off track from our purpose in life and the psyche and soul join forces to get us back on track – in a rather drastic way!

So these crises also wake us up. Our awakening comes through them. A related question would be ‘is it possible to fully wake up without some kind of crisis?’ My research into spiritual emergency down through the ages, of people such as St Teresa of Ávila, Ramana Maharshi, Carl Jung and Eckhart Tolle, who all went through it, suggests not. You can read their stories of moving through spiritual emergencr(y) in my book In Case of Spiritual Emergency.

This also ties in with the point Phil Borges, director of the film CrazyWise, made during his conversation with Dabney, about the need to surrender. The more we resist these experiences the more excruciating they become. If we can trust and go with the flow, and again mindfulness helps here, then we will not suffer quite so much. It is, however, totally understandable, when we’re going through hell, that we would not want to be going through hell! That tendency to resist is our default setting. It’s only if we’ve learnt through mindfulness training to be able to spot that, watch it and not buy into it that we can start to help make things a little easier for ourselves.

Don’t forget to download my FREE GIFT ‘Getting Grounded’ on the Shades of Awakening website – just scroll down to under my name. I’m delighted to be sharing this wonderful mindfulness practice with you. My students love it!

And if you want to learn more about mindfulness and how it helps us move successfully through spiritual emergency, I’m offering a live online training for professionals. You’ll learn mindfulness and how to use it to work with the process of spiritual emergence(y), both for yourself and your clients or patients. Full details here.